Murder bag

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This article discusses the forensics kit. For the television series, see No Hiding Place.

The murder bag was the first standardised forensics kit used by police officers at crime scenes. It was developed by Sir Bernard Spilsbury, a prominent British forensic pathologist known for his work on the case of Hawley Harvey Crippen, for Scotland Yard in 1924.

The need for such a kit became apparent during the investigation into the Patrick Mahon murder case of 1924. The murder scene was particularly grisly for the day, as Mahon had carved his victim, Emily Kaye, into several pieces, and then attempted to burn the pieces. When that proved unsuccessful, he boiled them, and had been caught throwing small pieces out of a train. Spilsbury was called to the scene to aid in locating and identifying several missing pieces. When he arrived, he discovered one detective using his bare hands to scoop up mounds of bloodied flesh and deposit them in a bucket. When asked why he wasn't wearing rubber gloves for the task, the officer replied that he never wore rubber gloves, and that no one he knew had in the seventeen years since the formation of the murder squad. After returning to Scotland Yard, Spilsbury reported the incident to Detective Superintendent William Brown, then the chief of the squad, and proposed a standardised kit to be provided to forensic officers in the field.

The kit was to be carried by all detectives responding to a homicide, and contained rubber gloves, tweezers, evidence bags, a magnifying glass, a compass, a ruler, swabs and a number of other items to be used for the collection of evidence. The contents of the kit evolved over the years to keep pace with advances in modern forensics.

[edit] In popular culture

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